13,609 research outputs found
Temporal Data Modeling and Reasoning for Information Systems
Temporal knowledge representation and reasoning is a major research field in Artificial
Intelligence, in Database Systems, and in Web and Semantic Web research. The ability to
model and process time and calendar data is essential for many applications like appointment
scheduling, planning, Web services, temporal and active database systems, adaptive
Web applications, and mobile computing applications. This article aims at three complementary
goals. First, to provide with a general background in temporal data modeling
and reasoning approaches. Second, to serve as an orientation guide for further specific
reading. Third, to point to new application fields and research perspectives on temporal
knowledge representation and reasoning in the Web and Semantic Web
Using Event Calculus to Formalise Policy Specification and Analysis
As the interest in using policy-based approaches for systems management grows, it is becoming increasingly important to develop methods for performing analysis and refinement of policy specifications. Although this is an area that researchers have devoted some attention to, none of the proposed solutions address the issues of analysing specifications that combine authorisation and management policies; analysing policy specifications that contain constraints on the applicability of the policies; and performing a priori analysis of the specification that will both detect the presence of inconsistencies and explain the situations in which the conflict will occur. We present a method for transforming both policy and system behaviour specifications into a formal notation that is based on event calculus. Additionally it describes how this formalism can be used in conjunction with abductive reasoning techniques to perform a priori analysis of policy specifications for the various conflict types identified in the literature. Finally, it presents some initial thoughts on how this notation and analysis technique could be used to perform policy refinement
Hierarchical agent supervision
Agent supervision is a form of control/customization where a supervisor restricts the behavior of an agent to enforce certain requirements, while leaving the agent as much autonomy as possible. To facilitate supervision, it is often of interest to consider hierarchical models where a high level abstracts over low-level behavior details. We study hierarchical agent supervision in the context of the situation calculus and the ConGolog agent programming language, where we have a rich first-order representation of the agent state. We define the constraints that ensure that the controllability of in-dividual actions at the high level in fact captures the controllability of their implementation at the low level. On the basis of this, we show that we can obtain the maximally permissive supervisor by first considering only the high-level model and obtaining a high- level supervisor and then refining its actions locally, thus greatly simplifying the supervisor synthesis task
cc-Golog: Towards More Realistic Logic-Based Robot Controllers
High-level robot controllers in realistic domains typically deal with
processes which operate concurrently, change the world continuously, and where
the execution of actions is event-driven as in ``charge the batteries as soon
as the voltage level is low''. While non-logic-based robot control languages
are well suited to express such scenarios, they fare poorly when it comes to
projecting, in a conspicuous way, how the world evolves when actions are
executed. On the other hand, a logic-based control language like \congolog,
based on the situation calculus, is well-suited for the latter. However, it has
problems expressing event-driven behavior. In this paper, we show how these
problems can be overcome by first extending the situation calculus to support
continuous change and event-driven behavior and then presenting \ccgolog, a
variant of \congolog which is based on the extended situation calculus. One
benefit of \ccgolog is that it narrows the gap in expressiveness compared to
non-logic-based control languages while preserving a semantically well-founded
projection mechanism
Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management
Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has
increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be
able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute
and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of
services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available
with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs
requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences
and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several
advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge
representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business
requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and
enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The
article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy
for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate
flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for
Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS),
submitted 19th March 200
Indexing the Event Calculus with Kd-trees to Monitor Diabetes
Personal Health Systems (PHS) are mobile solutions tailored to monitoring
patients affected by chronic non communicable diseases. A patient affected by a
chronic disease can generate large amounts of events. Type 1 Diabetic patients
generate several glucose events per day, ranging from at least 6 events per day
(under normal monitoring) to 288 per day when wearing a continuous glucose
monitor (CGM) that samples the blood every 5 minutes for several days. This is
a large number of events to monitor for medical doctors, in particular when
considering that they may have to take decisions concerning adjusting the
treatment, which may impact the life of the patients for a long time. Given the
need to analyse such a large stream of data, doctors need a simple approach
towards physiological time series that allows them to promptly transfer their
knowledge into queries to identify interesting patterns in the data. Achieving
this with current technology is not an easy task, as on one hand it cannot be
expected that medical doctors have the technical knowledge to query databases
and on the other hand these time series include thousands of events, which
requires to re-think the way data is indexed. In order to tackle the knowledge
representation and efficiency problem, this contribution presents the kd-tree
cached event calculus (\ceckd) an event calculus extension for knowledge
engineering of temporal rules capable to handle many thousands events produced
by a diabetic patient. \ceckd\ is built as a support to a graphical interface
to represent monitoring rules for diabetes type 1. In addition, the paper
evaluates the \ceckd\ with respect to the cached event calculus (CEC) to show
how indexing events using kd-trees improves scalability with respect to the
current state of the art.Comment: 24 pages, preliminary results calculated on an implementation of
CECKD, precursor to Journal paper being submitted in 2017, with further
indexing and results possibilities, put here for reference and chronological
purposes to remember how the idea evolve
Using the event calculus for tracking the normative state of contracts
In this work, we have been principally concerned with the representation of contracts so that their normative state may be tracked in an automated fashion over their deployment lifetime. The normative state of a contract, at a particular time, is the aggregation of instances of normative relations that hold between contract parties at that time, plus the current values of contract variables. The effects of contract events on the normative state of a contract are specified using an XML formalisation of the Event Calculus, called ecXML. We use an example mail service agreement from the domain of web services to ground the discussion of our work. We give a characterisation of the agreement according to the normative concepts of: obligation, power and permission, and show how the ecXML representation may be used to track the state of the agreement, according to a narrative of contract events. We also give a description of a state tracking architecture, and a contract deployment tool, both of which have been implemented in the course of our work.
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